Sohei Kamiya of Japan’s populist Sanseito Party. Photo: Screenshot

A far-right populist party whose leader railed against “Jewish capital” in an election stump speech secured one seat in the upper house of Japan’s parliament in Sunday’s elections.

Sanseito, a populist party launched in 2020, ran candidates in all of Japan’s 45 electoral districts. Sunday’s vote marked a major victory for the governing Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, with ballots cast just two days after the shock assassination of former premier Shinzo Abe.

Sanseito’s sole parliamentary representative will be the party’s general secretary and co-founder, 44-year-old Sohei Kamiya.

At a campaign rally in June, Kamiya told the crowd that Sanseito would not sell out Japan to “Jewish capital,” a remark that was greeted with applause.

According to Japan’s Mainichi news outlet, Sanseito boasts that it was “created from scratch because there are no parties to vote for.” Its platform centers around around “education for children,” “food and health,” “environmental conservation” and “protecting the nation.” The party spread its message though YouTube and other social media platforms, criticizing the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other party leaders include Akao Yumi, the niece of Akao Bin, who was described by Jeffrey Hall, an American academic who teaches at Kanda University in Japan, as “one of the most infamous ultranationalists in postwar Japanese history.”

Tweeted Hall: “Her profile on the Sanseito website mentions this fact like it is one of her qualifications.”

Hall also noted that Sanseito had promoted Mabuchi Mutsuo — a former Japanese ambassador to Ukraine who recently published a book that depicted renewed tensions between the US and China as a battle between “Judeo-Christian” and “Japanese” civilizations — on its social media channels.

Mutsuo was “under fire for promoting unhinged antisemitic/pro-Russia conspiracy theories,” Hall tweeted.